Month: September 2017

It has been announced at the Microsoft Ignite conference, a new functionality has been added to Azure Files services called Azure File Sync. With Azure File Sync you can synchronize your files stored on Azure File services with your On Premises files servers, and the other way around. To take advantage of it, you need to create a cloud endpoint and a server on point (basically the cloud and the…

The Azure Analysis Services now support firewall, allowing you to lock down the connectivity between Azure Analysis and the defined source. To access and configure this functionality, you can go to the Azure Analysis Services blade, within the Settings section Toggle to switch from Off to On; you will see the default rule (in fact option) “Allow access from Power BI” to keep you accessing Azure Analysis Services with Power…

A new feature has been available in preview on Azure to help you analyze usage trend and diagnose issues with your storage account. You can access Storage Metric from the portal or use REST API. From the portal access the storage account you want to gather the metrics and access the Metrics blade; you will be able to export the results to an Excel file or/and configure alerts NOTE you…

You can now automate update management for Azure Virtual Machine in an easier way. Using Azure Automation, you can now better manage updates management for your virtual machine on Azure. Prerequisites An automation account (see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/automation/automation-create-standalone-account for instruction if required) Virtual machine running on Azure ARM – Classic virtual machine are not supported – within the same resource group than the automation account A log analytics workplace – if no…

The following has been announced at the Ignite Conference for OneDrive: Coming on October 17th, Files On Demand. This feature was already announced as part of some Windows 10 Preview build. We now have an official date of delivery Silent Synch Auto Account Configuration, using Azure ADAL (Azure Active Directory Authentication Library), will support automatic and silent OneDrive provisioning, ensuring new users are automatically set for OneDrive (in some way…

With all the cloud services and regulation/compliance requirements, it may difficult to ensure you are indeed matching yours. To help you with that, Microsoft already did a good job by providing documentations and guideline but now it going to go one step further. Microsoft has announced a Compliance Center covering the full Microsoft cloud services, from Office 365 to Azure and Dynamics. You can already request to be onboarded as…

Authentication is a key to access corporate resources, hosted either on-premises (you can use ADFS to authenticate against Exchange to access your mailbox) or in the cloud (Office 365, Azure, Salesforce…). While Microsoft is working hard to make authentication process to his services a little bit easier for end-users (password synch, seamless single sign-on…), you may still rely on federated authentication using AD FS (Active Directory Federation Services). Troubleshooting authentication…

As you may know, some time ago Microsoft has released a cool feature on the Azure portal called Azure Cloud Shell. This feature is now supporting PowerShell (in preview) allowing you to run PS command directly from the portal Choose to use a PowerShell experience in Cloud Shell as an alternative to the existing Bash experience (also in public preview) while retaining the benefits of Cloud Shell, including: Authenticated access…

It has been announced at the Ignite conference, the Office 365 administration experience is evolving. You are going to get: more focused experience as every administrators may not need to have the same information level on a regular basis (user administrators may not need to have the health information while a service administrators may not need to know details about the last directory synchronization) new guides to help you manage…

Microsoft Teams is evolving again by adding Audio Conferencing capabilities. Users licensed for Audio Conferencing (formerly called PSTN Conferencing) will automatically have the dial in feature available in their Teams. You can learn more about it here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/audio-conferencing

A new security feature has been added to Azure called Azure DDoS Protection Service. This new service is integrated with Virtual Networks to protect you against DDoS attacks. It comes into 2 service levels: Azure DDoS Protection Basic Service with no additional cost associated and does not requires any configuration or application changes Azure DDoS Protection Standard Service is a new offering to provide more protection capabilities and is tuned…

A new Azure service has been introduced called Azure Migrate. This service will help to get guidance, insights and mechanisms to migrate workloads from On Premises to Azure. You can sign up for it from https://aka.ms/azuremigrate_home, you will need to provide an Azure subscription ID for accessing the preview At this time, this will help for VMware migration only (during the initial preview); Hyper-V will come at a later stage.

You may know an add-in has – called FindTime – been developed for some time already to help organizing meetings by settings a pool to get availability from participants (especially external ones). Now FindTime is getting easier to use with Outlook on the Web (or OWA) by getting available directly (without using the add-in) when you create a new meeting request (or calendar event as it is called on OWA)

As you may know, Microsoft has announced a new Windows Server management experience to manage on-premises system with the Honolulu project. The Honolulu project delivers a more modern interface for managing on-premises system through a web interface with no cloud footprint (no dependency what so ever with Azure or other clouds services). In this post I will go through the setup of the technical preview – available for download at…

As Microsoft Teams is growing up, Microsoft is adding new functionalities or features. This time this is about audit logging to be updated. With the update currently being deployed, administrators will have the ability to audit additional Teams events in the compliance portal. This covers: Adding/Removing a bot Adding/Removing a tab Adding/Removing a connector Adding/Removing a channel